William Wilde I - William Wilde

As William Wilde entered the room wearing his black frock coat with a chest pocket sporting a maroon pocket square, everyone stared at him. He was tall, with green eyes and a memorable inquisitive look. As he entered the room on a stormy day like that Sunday afternoon his long hair waved to the wind and at the same time he closed his umbrella and looked over the silenced room and took his hat off, people could not stop staring at him. Something sparkled on that person that came out of nowhere. He looked like an old actor from the beginnings of the century when movies were black and white, but he was not old at all. He was in his thirties and he had a perfectly trimmed beard an incisive nose and a pointy chin. In fact he was skinny and the type of clothes he was wearing made him even taller and slimmer.

He walked toward the window and sat down in the seat closer to the window while placed his umbrella and hat right next to him. The moment he sat down was the moment he crossed his legs in a fashionable way while his back was straight. He took from an inside pocket a packet of cigarettes. Sobranie Black Russian could be read on the slim box. As he lit his cigarette and looked through the window, down the street, which by that hour was getting dark due to the clouds and heavy rain, a waitress approached and asked what she could do for him. His hands were crossed, supported on the table. After some silence he finally answered:

- A glass of the finest red wine.

- Château Latour from 1983?

- Château Margaux 1983.

- You will have to do the payment in advance Monsieur. It is a very expensive wine and we are not allowed to…

As he took a black, slim wallet from an occult pocket in his coat, without stop staring through the window, he took seven notes of one hundred euro each from a wad of notes and he interrupted her and said:

- Don’t call me Monsieur. I am not French. Seven hundred is enough isn’t it?

The waitress consented with a surprised nod with those seven notes in his hand. Seven hundred Euros for a bottle of wine. For William it was just pocket change. After paying he continued smoking slowly his cigarette thoughtful.

When the wine arrived in a fancy bottle with that habitual creamy label of the Bordeaux wine and she set one glass, he uncrossed his hands and put the cigarette down the ashtray still in flame. She laid down on the table a beautiful glass and as she started opening carefully the bottle and poured some wine on his glass he said.

- Bring one more. There will be two persons drinking from this bottle.

That night he was not alone. It was five to twenty five, but Wilde always arrived five minutes earlier everywhere. He was careful, meticulous and scrupulous about everything., including time and places.

He sipped the wine. Deep and concentrated with a very attractive hue. It had a typical perfume. It was feminine. Perfect.

Outside the rain was getting heavier. From inside the restaurant William could see some people running with a newspaper in his head, protecting them from the heavy rain and some cars on the street mostly taxies.

He was waiting for her.

Suddenly under a street lamp a tall and slim figure appeared. Black umbrella, long black coat and a skirt below the knees.

As she crossed the street he followed her shadow with his piercing eyes. Then she entered the lobby. Her hair was black and everyone on the room could see that she had a voluptuous body under the long coat, complemented with green eyes, an oval and pretty face and long dark hair. She was beautiful.

As the waitress approached her she closed the umbrella and just passed her by without saying a word sitting down in front of him.

Fantasies

We all have them. Humanity lives from fantasies and will always live. The fantasy of conquering is the most common. From Alexander the Great to Hitler. Fantasies are everywhere. Did you ever look in the eyes of somebody and saw the glow of them? That shinny sparkle? Well for me each one of those sparkles around the iris are fantasies. Love, cars, houses, money, friendship…and then you die. After you die there goes the glow in your eyes, they turn to opaque balls without any kind of sparkle. No more fantasies.

Well, everyone wants to conquer. You may be hypocrite and say “No, I don’t really want a thing, I already have everything I need”, but unless you are something different from a human being you will always want something else, something more. It is not bad, I am not saying that, have a passion for something and struggle for it is healthy. But then it turns out in competition and everything that is good turns out to be bad.

Nowadays people still have fantasies, but they are competition fantasies. That kind of fantasies that only drives you mad if you don’t achieve what you want. Remember Alexander who was driven mad and Hitler who, some say, shot himself. Remember those people who quit living because they had fantasies that never materialized.

Why don’t we all turn ourselves to the mirror and say: “I am completely happy”? Because we are human and until the day we die, and maybe later who knows, we will always have those fantasies. And Nicky (Ashton Kutcher, Spread 2009) had so many in the place where all fantasies come true: Hollywood, Los Angeles. As he said, every week or month I don’t really know 30000 people go there to accomplish their fantasies, and 30000 leave, that’s why the boarding stations are in different levels. So no one who arrives sees the disillusion in the faces of those who leave.

In some moments you really think that you are completely happy. You are everything you ever wanted. Yes, but I said in some moments, not in your life, because life goes up and down, up and down, up and down in a cycle that never stops. If you want to say now that you are completely happy take a step back. Isn’t there anything that you want? In these minutes you are reading this maybe not. But if you continue reading and wasting your time, maybe you will get hungry, sleepy or you will want to go to the bathroom. Isn’t that a fantasy or a wish? It is. You, as an human will never have everything you want. But you, as an human, could be really happy nevertheless.

Nothing can stop humanity from advance beyond the limits of their own imagination. Even Carnot may be wrong, maybe there is something that is perpetual, maybe there is a machine that has an efficiency greater than 100%. Maybe Einstein is wrong and E=mc²+1. During more than 15 centuries modern civilization thought that sun was just a star floating around Earth. Guess what? Aristotle was wrong. And for a fantasy, a certainty, Copernicus died, but after that everything that was truth was after a lie.

To be honest with you I have many fantasies. Some of them never realized and will never be realized; nevertheless I will struggle for the others that remain. When no one remains then I am officially dead for the world, until then no one will stop me from believing that it is possible to have more than three dimensions in a material world, to travel faster than the speed of light, to have efficiency greater than 100%, and to have perpetual movement machines. World is greater than we can imagine and many times you are deceived by its greatness.

Imagine that you have a rope around Earth by the equator. Well that rope would have around 40000 Km’s. Imagine that you had a meter to that rope. What animal do you think will pass under? A bacteria or an ant? Lets say that everyone reasonable would just say that it was the bacteria. 1 meter in 40.000.000 meters is not a reasonable difference. I just say that anything is what it looks like. And the ant would pass under that rope with great relaxation.

So I think that many of those fantasies we have, that in the moment are really impossible and unimaginable, are nothing more than something possible in the future.

You know, in the end of the movie I was talking about above, Spread, Nicky didn’t get the girl, didn’t get the money, nothing at all despite all his fantasies. Nevertheless he found a job and leave is “career” as a playboy, faced is problems in life and got a job as a delivery boy. In the end of the movie he just fed a frog with a rat and the last moments of the movie are that frog eating the rat slowly. Pretty disturbing. But the message in my opinion is that no one is happy without first eating some rats. Here, in Portugal we say “engolir um sapo”: swallow a frog. It costs, but sometimes it is necessary. Like fantasies. Sometimes you have to abdicate from some, sometimes you have to do what you don’t like. But after you swallow the rat you feel very comfortable and warm with your full tummy don’t you?

Concluding, fantasies are essential. You just should not push yourself too hard. Good is good. Excellent is excellent. But average can be good as well can’t it? I have fantasies. I will always have and when someone take them away from me or block my way of achieving one I will be mad with that someone. Nevertheless I am not obsessed by them and I’ll just wait for them to come true, battling and struggling of course but without run over anyone.